Survey in Pocket – Every journey begins with a small step

Many people have been asking me this question recently and I’m really happy to know that someone is curious about our business.

The idea appeared during a conversation between Ninh and I two months ago when we were chatting about the life in Finland. I told him how surprised I was at the fact that our school is still using the traditional paper survey to get student feedback. Then just a few days later, I found myself excited to do feedback with interactive emoticons on an iPad floor stand at Nordea bank. Ninh shared the same feeling about this contradiction. Then we think: What happens if we combine these two? How about an interactive survey to get student feedback?

The idea sounded cool and awesome. We talked with Nam, our close friend, about this idea and it really intrigued him. We all thought that schools would find this useful and decided to make the idea happen. In the following weeks, we started building the prototype and talked with schools staffs about our ideas. It was actually very challenging at that time, because everything we have was only an abstract idea and our schools were not ready to change the traditional processes.

About two weeks later, I heard about the Ahjo Program of MikkeliES. I had come to some events of MikkeliES before and they were quite exciting, so I’m kind of curious to see what this Ahjo Program is. That was the first official time I met Olli and Piritta. After listening about the content of the program, I figured out that it was a very good opportunity to meet other experienced entrepreneurs and have them helping us with our project. My friends also agreed to join Ahjo though they worried a bit as there was only me in Mikkeli during the whole program (now we all know that it was the right decision).

In eight weeks, the program has guided us through the basic steps of a startup business. Everything started with identifying customers, understanding their pains, finding our value proposition, creating the first MVP and pitching our ideas. As the program accelerated, every team including us, was continuously improving and moving forward.

At the beginning, we came to the program with an abstract idea of creating a survey application with better design and features. Then after eight weeks, we have developed a clear mission, that guided us through our business. Whenever making a decision about anything, e.g. a new feature for Survey in Pocket, we always ask ourselves a “magic” question: “Will our customer get more feedback if we do this?” If the answer is ‘No’, then we will not do that. This question is extremely helpful to focus our efforts on important matters and stick with our original mission: “To help our clients get more customer feedback”.

For now, we have done our first MVP, but there are still many questions regarding it: “How will Survey in Pocket help businesses?”; “What are already good and what need to be improved?”. Only customers can answer these questions and we are now looking for them.

Startup Spirit in Mikkeli

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